Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth (2 page)

We are living in exciting times. There are many concerns about health-of both the human population and the planet. Those concerns open the door to opportunities for each of us to make a difference — and we can begin in our gardens at home! When we choose to eat food grown in a way that increases the planet’s vitality, we are participating in a process that will strengthen the ecosystem and ensure the future of humankind. With my work through Ecology Action, I have strived to help people worldwide take part in this harmonious renewal through gardening. I met Cindy Conner when she attended an Ecology Action Three Day Workshop in October 2000 in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. She was already involved in becoming food self-reliant, and she has very actively kept on equipping herself and others since then, including teaching workshops and talks for the public and at the university level.

This book is based on lots of practical experience gleaned by Cindy Conner over a 30-year period — and you can benefit from this treasure trove right now! Most important,
Grow a Sustainable Diet
is written from a fresh vantage point that places you in the action. Numerous easy-to-follow plans are given including overall garden layouts, tips on crop choices, timing plantings so your food will be ready to eat when you want to eat it, when to harvest, how long to harvest, and how to get the
most
calories and protein from the smallest area in a reasonable amount of time are shared.

The excitement and challenge of eating only what you grow one day a week, the advantage of keeping records to increase your bounty,
minimizing the expense of outside inputs are explored. Even the pattern of crops to grow for the best diet and most fertile soil with the least area and effort are explored. The benefit of most insects for your garden mini-farm, plant/harvest time worksheets, garden maps with crop rotation information, and seed growing and preservation details are given.

You will be surprised, delighted and amazed about how the planning tables take the guesswork and work out of food growing each week! Food storage and preservation in a pantry, crawlspace root cellar with solar food dryers and even in a no-energy-cost cooling cabinet are described as ways to make possible eating your harvest available all year.

Everything is organized to make your learning experience easy and fun. I wish I had had this book when I began gardening and planning diets over 40 years ago. What an advantage that you have it now!

— John Jeavons

Author of
How To Grow More Vegetables (and Fruits, Nuts Berries, Grains and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine

January, 2014

First, a little history…

I
HAVE WORKED TOWARD
learning how to grow food while feeding the soil in return and I want to share what I’ve learned, so that others can add my experiences to their own, hopefully inspiring new ideas. Since having my first garden in 1974 at age 23, I have always been an organic gardener, avoiding chemicals and learning about soil building. I began to garden because I wanted to have a healthy family. Jarod, our oldest child, celebrated his first birthday the same summer I put in my first garden.

I became aware of the connection between what we eat and our health in a seventh grade science class. I remember seeing a chart showing nutrients, the foods that contained them, and what part of the body each nutrient (food) helped. It made quite an impression. I went on to graduate from Ohio State University with a degree in Home Economics Education. Although not my focus at the time, the courses I took in food and nutrition at Ohio State continued to influence me. My intention when I chose that major was to become an extension agent and help families be better producers at home. Little did I know then, that although that’s what my calling in life would be, it wouldn’t happen through the extension service. I began the adventure of a lifetime and became a stay-at-home mom. Our family filled out with four children, all the more reason to study and learn how to provide the best food possible for them.

In Hanover County, Virginia, I was often the only organic grower people knew and I would get phone calls with questions. I realized a healthy family isn’t enough. I needed to work towards a healthy community and in 1992 I began selling produce, primarily lettuce, to two
local restaurants. From 1993 to 1997, I was also a parent volunteer on a garden project at our children’s elementary school. We began a compost operation with the food waste collected by the students in the cafeteria and leaves dropped off by parents. Garden beds were developed for each classroom teacher who wanted one. It was wonderful for the children but from that experience it was plain to me that the teachers and volunteers I was meeting had not been reading the same things I had all those years. Someone needed to be teaching the adults. Then there would be more knowledgeable people out there to work on school gardens and teach the children.

In 1998 I taught an organic vegetable gardening class through our county parks and recreation program. I highly recommend that, by the way, for those of you wanting to get started sharing your knowledge. I taught that class every winter for six years. In January 1999 I began teaching at the community college. Until that time, the horticulture department at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College was only concerned with conventional landscaping. I taught a course in organic vegetable gardening that spring semester and taught Four Season Food Production during the fall semester. Those classes continue, although the name of the spring class is now Introduction to Biointensive Mini-Farming.

In 1997 and 1998 I added a small CSA with 10 to 14 families to my farming operation. CSA, short for community supported agriculture, is a method of marketing to families who agree at the beginning of the season to be members of the buying group for the whole season. My CSA families arrived at their appointed time each week, paying weekly for the bag of produce I had ready for each of them. In 1999 I helped start the Ashland Farmers Market in my community. In 2001, my last year to sell vegetables, I also attended the 17th St. Farmers Market in Richmond, Virginia. I had thought the way I could contribute to a healthy community was by providing nutrition-packed, chemical-free food. But I found that people needed more than that. They needed to understand what they were getting, why they should want it, how to grow it themselves, and the list went on. They needed education.

I left selling at the markets after the 2001 season hoping to be able to put more knowledgeable consumers and producers there through
my teaching and researching. In the fall of 2001 I added a Growing for Market class to my teaching schedule and began work developing a Biointensive garden at the college. Spring semester 2002 I added Complete Diet Mini-Farming, rounding out what has become their sustainable agriculture program.

The best way to learn something is to teach it. For many years I had been studying best practices and considered myself a good organic grower, although I was never certified. After I started teaching I realized there was still more to learn. It is possible to be organic to the letter-of-the-law and still not be sustainable. One group working actively on sustainability issues was John Jeavons and his crew at Ecology Action in Willits, California. I began studying their publications and keeping records on the necessary crops. When John gave a three-day workshop in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in October 2000, I was there. In July 2001 I traveled to Ecology Action to attend a teacher workshop and in the following year was certified as an Ecology Action GROW BIOINTENSIVE® Sustainable Mini-Farming Teacher at the basic level. My work then became focused on what it would take to sustainably grow all of one’s diet, not just food in general. In 2006 I became certified at the intermediate level of teaching. That same year I spent two weeks living in a tent at Three Sisters Farm in Pennsylvania, earning a certificate in permaculture design in a class taught by Darrell Frey.

I was learning wherever I could. Virginia Tech had begun to have field days showing new ways to manage cover crops. Actually, they were teaching an organic method of no-till. Each time you till the soil, organic matter is lost plus you contribute to hardpan, especially when using big equipment. That’s why farmers embraced no-till methods. Unfortunately those methods involved killing the cover crop with herbicides, then planting. Now, instead of using herbicides, Virginia Tech and others involved in similar research were suggesting letting the cover crops grow to maturity, or almost to maturity, to get the most biomass both above and below the ground. At that point, the crop would be rolled or cut down, then planted into. Of course, they were talking farming with big tractors. Doing this work involved agricultural engineers developing roller/crimpers to roll the crop down and make sure it stayed
down. In order to transplant into all that residue, new equipment had to be developed. It was important to know what crops to plant, the timing, and how to handle everything.

When I attended the first field day on this, I thought it was wonderful. Through my GROW BIOINTENSIVE work I had been growing cover crops and cutting them with a sickle for biomass for the compost pile. I was familiar with most of the crops and knew how to grow them and how much was needed. What they were showing at the field days was when to roll it or cut it to lie down as mulch and let it compost in place. It was as if all the pieces were coming together in a puzzle. I was pretty excited and I’m sure that came through when I talked to Dr. Ron Morse who headed up the project.

In 2006, I was invited to attend a series of train-the-trainer events held by Virginia Tech for cooperative extension agents, and soil and water conservation personnel. To me, finding a sustainable no-till method being promoted was huge. This was a whole new approach and I was excited to see it being taught to these people whose job it was to educate others. I wondered, however, how much of this information would get to the local farmers. In the past I had seen extension programs come and go. During the years the research was funded, there would be field days and informative meetings. Then, however, it would be written up in bulletins and buried in the files. I hoped that would not be the case with this material.

For work on a smaller scale I realized that I could translate this information into ways to manage cover crops with hand tools. Knowing the right crop to plant at the right time, and when to cut it, was all the same whether you were going through a field on a tractor or tending a garden with a sickle. Instead of roller/crimpers and no-till planting aids we just needed a sickle and a sturdy trowel. In particular, I could see how this would benefit small-scale market growers. I was going to teach this in my classes at the college, but I needed to reach even more people.

When he was in high school our youngest son, Luke, would sometimes film me in the garden and I would show the film in class. After high school Luke went to film school. Upon graduating he returned home and I realized that, with Luke’s help, I could get this information to
people through a video. We filmed an episode in the garden each month except August, from March through November 2007. In February 2008 we released the 66-minute DVD
Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden
, showing it at the annual conference sponsored by the Virginia Association for Biological Farming and Virginia State University.

One thing leads to another and even before that video was finished I knew I would have to produce one about garden planning. Through my years of teaching I had developed a method of getting a whole garden plan on paper, enabling my students to all present their plans to me in the same way. This was more than just a way to make grading easier. Knowing what it takes to plan growing for the markets, I had developed a way to make that planning easier. It was information I wish I had when I was selling vegetables. At the beginning of the season I would know how many seeds and plants I would need, what was to be planted where and when, and when to expect a harvest. In January 2010 we released the video
Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan
. It includes a 115-minute DVD, plus a CD with all the worksheets. My husband, Walt, a computer programmer, was tech support for those worksheets. In the DVD I teach garden planning for the first hour, and you meet nine other gardeners and tour their seven gardens in the second hour.

Producing those videos was intense work. Transforming the information I wanted to get across was one thing. Learning the ins and outs of video production was quite another. Luke did a great job filming and editing. Working with any other film crew would have been quite a different experience, I’m sure. To even my own surprise, once that second video was done I decided I needed to leave the college in order to address a larger community. Conveniently, our daughter Betsy was moving back to Virginia from Arkansas that year and was able to take over teaching the classes. Betsy is one of the gardeners in the garden plan video, walking you through her Arkansas market garden. Today I continue my work on sustainable diets, including how to get food all the way to the table using the least fossil fuel, and I write a blog at
HomeplaceEarth.wordpress.com
. Occasionally I get out and about to promote my work and Walt often joins me to man the Homeplace Earth booth while I’m speaking.

Our second oldest son, Travis, a talented artist and photographer, readily agreed to photograph cover crop seeds so that I could show them on the packaging of the first video. He emailed the photos to me in January, 2008. Four days later, he suddenly passed away at age 30. Since then, I have learned much about what happens when we pass from this world to the next. We are not really gone, just changed, and our energy is still here. Travis has made sure that our family and his friends have received many signs and much guidance and love from him. It has been quite a journey, these past years.